How Hubspot Turned Twitter Into A Conversion Machine (And Got 55% More Leads In The Process)

Tim:Welcome to Conversion Cast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

Hey fellow marketers, thanks for joining me today. Now today’s guest used images to result in a fantastic increase in conversation rate from the very beginning of the funnel to the very end. To see clear cut example of how to utilize such images in your marketing, visit ConversionCast.com/HubSpotDownload, that’s ConversionCast.com/HubSpotDownload and implement it in your business today.

Let’s talk about social media, shall we? It’s one of those things that you either love talking about or hate talking about and the reason why is because there’s such a divide between people who believe social media is the holy grail of marketing and those who see it as a waste of time. The folks at HubSpot are no dummies though. They know that the only way to find out of something works is to test it. Ellie Mirman is back on the show today to discuss how they used one painfully sinful tactic to see big results from freaking Twitter. You’ll love this because you could do it in about three seconds. The last time Ellie was on, the response was amazing so we just had to bring her back. I’m Tim Page the conversion educator here at LeadPages. This is Conversion Cast and here is Ellie Mirman from HubSpot.

All right, Ellie awesome. Thank you so much for coming back in the show. The last show we did was awesome and I’m excited to talk about this new test that you’ve been able to do.

Ellie:Great. Thanks so much for having me on again.

Tim:Cool. So in this one let’s just go ahead and dig in what were the results that you were able to get?

Ellie:So we were able to see a 55% increase in leads from Twitter specifically after this test that we ran.

Tim:Wow that’s awesome. And that’s so unique. We haven’t talked about Twitter yet on the show and you know so many people use Twitter as like a tool to tell everybody what they’re having for dinner. So this is cool to know that it can be used to get great results. So before we dig into that, you know, we did talk about this before but I think it’s important to hear what HubSpot is all about. So can you kind of talk about that for a minute?

Ellie:Sure. So HubSpot is a marketing software platform for businesses. Specifically for businesses that are looking to get found online by their potential customers, attract them to their website, convert them online, measure the whole process and get more customers in the end.

Tim:Cool I love it and what’s your role there?

Ellie:I’m the inbound marketing funnel manager so my team owns all of our kind of inbound channels like social media for example that is responsible for attracting people and converting them.

Tim:Just the right person for this talk I love it. [Laughs]

Ellie:[Laughs]

Tim:So what gave you the idea to implement this tactic?

Ellie:So we started doing this tactic because of some changes that happened on Twitter actually. So Twitter started to roll out more and more kind of images, autodisplay of images within their stream and so we wanted to see what the results would be if we started to post more images.

Tim:Cool. Yeah so that was a noticeable thing. A lot of people kind of took note of that. I don’t think anybody implemented or took action on it as well as you guys did. So that’s really. So why don’t you kind of get into it? What was it that you did that got you such amazing results?

Ellie:Yeah. So we tested out just kind of our normal Twitter stream, our normal publishing day twitter against publishing more of our tweets with images within them. So what that meant was that our image, our tweets would start to show with images right there and we ended up finding that that increased pretty much all of the metrics across the board. We saw an increase in clicks, an increase in retweets, an increase in favorites and an increase even in our conversion rate of those visitors when they came to our website into becoming leads.

Tim:Well this might a little speculative but why do you think that that works so well?

Ellie:I think it works, you know, these are here, right. When you know the metrics, you know what happens when we finally did it,

Tim:Yeah.

Ellie:My theory is that it just stands out, right? You’re looking at your Twitter stream, you see a whole bunch of texts but what you saw back was the images. It’s something that’s much more engaging, much more interesting and it’s you know, even just literally takes up more space on the screen. You get more real estate on someone’s browser. So I think that for those reasons it caught more attention and it got people to be more engaged with the content that we are publishing.

Tim:Yeah. That’s a great point. I mean so what were the – what would a typical image be like if you were you know, let’s say you were tweeting about something? Can you tell us about that tweet like what the tweet itself might read, what kind of image you would have in there?

Ellie:Yeah. Well take an example of just you know, publishing one of our eBooks. So we have a bunch of different eBooks. Let’s say for example we’re promoting our introduction to how to use Twitter for business eBook right. We write a lot about marketing because we are marketing to marketers. It’s a lot of fun.

Tim:Right.

Ellie:So for example if we were publishing that out we and would test the nonimage variation against the image variation. We want to keep it as apple to apples as possible. So the nonimage variation would just say hey, you know, here’s our introductory eBook on how to use Twitter for business, maybe we would call out a particular take away from it and link to the eBook. Simple as that.

[0:05:19]

The image variation would be pretty much the same. We want them to be as apples to apples as possible but we would include an image of either the eBook cover or one of the images from the eBook itself. We tested both the difference wasn’t too huge. It seemed that the biggest difference was including an image or not. That was really the big difference.

Tim:Got you. So even you know, the call to action, the copy was all the same. It was just adding —

Ellie:Yup.

Tim:–wow.

Ellie:Yeah.

Tim:That’s amazing that something so simple like that but I mean it’s similar to if you had let’s say you had like an opt-in page and you know you had just the opt-in form or if you had an image of the eBook. A lot of people are finding that the image of the eBook converts better.

Ellie:Yeah.

Tim:So I wonder if it’s like the idea that it makes it –you know, kind of makes it real they’re going to get something tangible.

Ellie:Uh-hum. Yeah. You get to know what you’re about to get. I mean it’s one of those best practices for landing pages anyway even for something as simple as singing up for an email newsletter. Email newsletter is a whole different story but even just putting an image of an example email newsletter on the landing page can help increase conversion rates. So showing people what they’re going to get once they give you their information can definitely help.

Tim:Yeah and here’s kind of an interesting question. We talked last time about how you kind of –you know, you have a lot of tests that failed along with the test that succeed. When you went into this test, did you think that you were going to get better results by adding pictures or was it just a hope?

Ellie:I think that we certainly hoped. It kind of made sense kind of as a possibility but we never really take that for granted. We always want to see the data before we make any decisions. Because sometimes you have that gut feel and it’s wrong. So we definitely wanted to test it out.

Tim:Yeah and this is something that really doesn’t take a whole lot of extra time to implement to get you know, —

Ellie:Yeah.

Tim:–such an increase.

Ellie:Yeah.

Tim:So that’s awesome.  I mean is there anything looking back that you would want to change about it?

Ellie:I think that I would have wanted the switch to doing this much sooner. [Laughs]

Tim:[Laughs]

Ellie:Right? I think the other thing with this is you know, while we hoped it would have a positive improvement, I don’t think that we expected to see this much of a lift. You know, I think we expected like you know, a few more clicks, a few more retweets of you know, probably not a change to the [0:07:31] [Indiscernible] lead conversion rate. I thought we would see like a little bit of a gunk but not this much of an increase. So I’m psyched about the results and I just wish we had found it sooner.

Tim:Yeah. So what does that mean for you going forward? I mean will there be something that you’ll be kind of testing going forward that you’re excited about?

Ellie:We’re you know, constantly running tests. I think that when we find something like this, find some result like this, we want to b move to our next drastic test. I much more prefer the drastic test over the small improvement because the drastic tests are what give you those step improvements, you know, those jumps in like 55% more leads rather than you know, 5%. So we’re doing things like testing the mix of kind of personality in our tweets, kind of an interesting test I think because a lot of companies talk about branding and their personality in social media profiles but no one has actually put metrics behind it. So that’s kind of our next big thing.

Tim:Yeah. I mean that’s you know, AWeber is kind of doing something similar where they changed the copy on their homepage.

Ellie:Uh-hum.

Tim:Instead of being very business focused, they changed the very personal focused and they got —

Ellie:Yeah.

Tim:– a 13% increase in conversion. So it’s awesome to test this stuff. I’m glad to hear that you’re going to be doing that and I hope that we can kind of catch up and let us know how that goes in the future.

Ellie:Absolutely.

Tim:Awesome, Ellie. Thank you so much for being here again and contributing to Conversion Cast. Everybody really appreciate that.

Ellie:Great. Thanks so much.

Tim:Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversion Cast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at Conversion Cast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.